Unbankerly Behavior

By Daniel Koehler

In the early 1960s, small town bank president, HENRY POTTS, has maneuvered himself into a very sweet deal.

He and his philandering son-in-law are looting the Union Guaranty Bank under the guise of a cost-cutting “Unbank” marketing campaign. However, JOHN JIMPSON, the randy son-in-law and chief marketing officer, has a problem—he cannot keep his hands off the female help.

When Henry hires CLYDINE CLUMM, a platinum-blond honky-tonk angel on the rebound as his private secretary, all hell breaks loose in the executive suite, including a missing briefcase of stolen loot.

PRAISE FOR "UNBANKERLY BEHAVIOR"

"The Harlan Lane era of Little Rock's Union National Bank is the setting for this hilarious tale about the pitfalls of overreaching greed."
H. Hall McAdams, III, Former Chairman of Union National Bank in the post-Harlan Lane era.
"A wry postcard from Little Rock's checkered past."
Steven Hanley, Columnist, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniel Koehler
• Release date: Sep 3, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452316642

Daniel Koehler

Daniel Koehler is the author of four novels, "Flyover Country" (2004), "The Sleeping Cab" (2006), "Unbankerly Behavior" (2008), and "Splitting Washington" (2010). His short pieces have appeared in The Best of Tales From the South, The Birmingham Arts Journal, New Works Review, BareBack Magazine, Inner Sins, The Rusty Nail, The Storyteller, The Harvard Bulletin, among others. Literary honors include finalist status in three international screenplay competitions and regional awards for his short stories.Prior to his writing career, he pursued professional interests in New York City. He has written software used extensively in the financial sector. He attended Leopold-Franzens Universität in Innsbruck, Austria, and is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and Harvard.

Book preview

UNBANKERLY BEHAVIOR

By

Daniel Koehler

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * *

PUBLISHED BY:

KSI/Noosphere Publishing

Unbankerly Behavior

Copyright © 2010 by Daniel Koehler

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

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For the late Bob Ginnaven, who dreamed up the Unbank advertising campaign, and for my friends and banking colleagues, Hall McAdams and Bob Connor, who helped clean up the Unbank mess and shared such wonderful stories about it with me.

Prologue

In the summer of 1968, the Arkansas River molassed its way between the overgrown river banks separating the cities of Little Rock and North Little Rock, Arkansas, its waters an indeterminate shade of brown.

Depending on the time of year, the river’s color ranged anywhere from dark khaki to muddy red. That summer, however, were a god to view the mighty Arkansas from an Olympian vantage point, the pagan deity might well liken the river’s hue to that of the effluent resulting from Hercules’ cleaning of the Augean Stables.

When the inevitable spring floods came, the river would often carve new channels for itself and establish its banks further inland. At these times, the flood plain of North Little Rock appeared as though Lord Poseidon himself had ladled a foul-smelling batch of primordial soup over its extent with a malicious lack of regard for the petty boundaries ascribed it by geographers and politicians.

Despite the colonoscopic aspect of their river, the people of Arkansas took justifiable pride in what the future held for their state’s alluvial namesake. That summer, on the front page of the Arkansas Grenadier newspaper, Chief Engineer Charles Dorsey Maynard of the US Army Corps of Engineers predicted the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation Project would be completed by October.

At last, the people of Arkansas could breathe a sigh of relief. Washington, D.C. had finally addressed foursquare the river’s tragic brownness problem as well as its propensity to inundate its least-prepared citizens at the most inopportune times. The tenacious US Army Corps of Engineers had constructed a series of locks and dams along the Arkansas with the aim of regulating this fourteen-hundred mile long, undisciplined torrent and transforming its silt-tauped waters into a clear, placid stream navigable to commercial traffic.

Although the advent of river navigation was an obvious feather in the cap of Little Rock, its sister city on the north bank of the Arkansas River, dubbed Dogtown by the capital city, was less than giddy with anticipation with the prospect of barge traffic. Being a railroad town, North Little Rock was not anxious for more freight-hauling competition.

The south side of the river, Little Rock, being the capital city of the state, seemed to tutter at Dogtown across the chicory waters of the Arkansas River as a society matron would at an arriviste using the wrong fork at a fancy dinner party.

At dusk, colored people would line the Dogtown bank of the Arkansas, fishing the sloughs and eddies with cane poles for drum or buffalo. Considered rough fish by most sport anglers, Field and Stream usually did not rhapsodize about these species in its pages, but nonetheless they were plentiful, of sufficient size to feed a family, and quite delicious when breaded and deep-fried.

A caste system of a different sort, however, existed in Central Arkansas that transcended indigenous fresh-water fish. This hierarchy reached higher up the food chain to embrace the hominids dwelling on both sides of the river.

Little Rock was home to the Arkansas Grenadier newspaper, which, by virtue of its coverage of the city’s 1957 high school desegregation crisis, had won a Pulitzer Prize for Journalism. As one grizzled newspaper veteran put it: Hell, back then, the editorial staff was all eat up with integration like they had invented the word.

After 1957, Arkansas stoically borne the opprobrium heaped upon it by the national press, which skewered the state as the home of rednecks, racists, and rabid Razorbacks fans. Nonetheless, the two million people of Arkansas benefited disproportionately from the comfortable politics of incumbency in the one-party Democratic Solid South.

In Washington, D.C., thirty-year Arkansas incumbents held major sway in both houses of Congress due to the seniority system, chairing key congressional committees such as Appropriations and Foreign Relations.

Appropriately, the Arkansas State Capitol building was a three-quarter scale Doppelgänger for the U.S. Capitol, both architecturally and politically, since Democratic incumbents had historically dominated state and local politics.

However, in 1968 the political status quo in Arkansas had changed, sending a tidal wave of fear through the Democratic political machine that for decades had run state government like it were its own private stock pond.

In 1966, Winston Rothschild had ascended to the Governor’s seat. A transplanted Boston millionaire and Republican, he had the distinction of being the first GOP Governor of Arkansas since Reconstruction.

What most frightened the Arkansas Democratic machine, however, was that the wealthy Republican appeared well on his way to landing a second gubernatorial term. In preliminary polls for the upcoming November 1968 election, Governor Rothschild was handily outpolling the Democratic candidate, Odell Fougerousse.

Despite being a scion of an old-money Eastern banking family, Winston Rothschild had always thumbed his nose at his Brahmin kinfolk and their playboy traditions back east. He had moved to Arkansas in the 1950’s based on friendships cultivated in World War II, when he enlisted in the Army as a buck private. In 1961, Rothschild gave Little Rock the Rothschild Cultural Center, which attracted world-class art exhibits and curators.

For a sleepy Southern city, a Pulitzer Prize and a Rothschild can be stout brew, but such acclaim often exhibits itself first as triumph and subsequently as folly. One suspects the latter case was in full bloom at the Arkansas Grenadier in 1968. Pulitzer fervor had trickled down to even routine local beat stories, which suddenly became laden with racial implications. Take, for example, this story of June 12, 1968:

Branch Bank Robbed By Crazed Man in Norge Carton

By Tucker Entebett

LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS. Hiding inside a large appliance carton, a white man of small stature spat racial imprecations at the female branch manager of the Union Guaranty Bank on East Roosevelt Road and forced her at gunpoint to drag the large carton inside the bank just before closing Friday.

Once inside, the racist white man made remarks about the local Negro population and then placed a Kraft paper sack over the female bank manager’s head, making off with $16,500. The courageous female bank manager, Eudora Lukas, 44, was found dehydrated but otherwise unharmed after spending the weekend locked inside the bank’s whites-only restroom.

A spokesman for the LRPD was unwilling to confirm that the bank job was racially motivated. However, Henry Potts, President of Union Guaranty Bank, was quick to assure all bank customers in this primarily Negro section of town their money was safe and 100% insured by the U.S. Government.

Indeed, now that it could tout itself as the "Pulitzer Prize-winning Arkansas Grenadier," its editorial page began to ooze censure from every pulpy pore. Unenlightened public opinion was castigated daily for being—well, unenlightened, and the unwashed were mercilessly taken to task for innate failings by the crusading Pulitzer winners on the editorial staff.

For their own good, of course—the unenlightened, that is.

Despite the Grenadier’s censure, and perhaps in spite of it, Little Rock kept advancing deliberately to higher heights of urban urbaneness.